Non-poisson Processes of Email Virus Propagation

Mirchev, Miroslav; Kocarev, Ljupco

Email viruses are one of the main security problems in the Internet. In order to stop a computer virus outbreak, we need to understand email interactions between individuals. Most of the spreading models assume that users interact uniformly in time following a Poisson process, but recent measurements have shown that the intercontact time follows heavy-tailed distribution. The non-Poisson nature of contact dynamics results in prevalence decay times significantly larger than predicted by standard Poisson process based models. Email viruses spread over a logical network defined by email address books. The topology of this network plays important role in the spreading dynamics. Recent observations suggest that node degrees in email networks are heavy-tailed distributed and can be modeled as power law network. We propose an email virus propagation model that considers both heavy-tailed intercontact time distribution, and heavy-tailed topology of email networks.